


to that awaited place in the same dream

by midheaven



Series: good together [1]
Category: Nogizaka46 (Band)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Established Relationship, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-18 14:02:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29119407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midheaven/pseuds/midheaven
Summary: Haruka’s own hand is gentle, travelling from the crown of Seira’s head back to her shoulder. “You’ll be fine,” she says again, and Seira is in love with her enough to believe her.Five moments between Seira and Haruka.
Relationships: Hayakawa Seira/Kaki Haruka
Series: good together [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2136615
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	to that awaited place in the same dream

**Author's Note:**

> title from loona’s universe.

_ この人なら心から安心できるっていう気持ち  
それは好きだってことなのよ？  _

_ It’s the feeling of ease whenever I’m around that person.   
If that isn’t love, then what is?  _

麦秋 (1951) dir. 小津 安二郎

  
  
  
  


“Think I need to be taller for this.”

Haruka’s responding laugh comes like bell chimes, foil to the phantom weight bearing down on Seira’s limbs. “For what?” Haruka asks. 

Seira had been spending the last eight hours in relentless repetition—stubbornness persisting until she’s perfected the timing of every flick of her wrist to the half second. Every stretch of her leg to a fraction of a degree. Cleans out her expressions, too: sculpts the flash of her smile, the cleverness of her eyes. 

“This.” Seira gestures toward herself, opts to speak to Haruka’s reflection in the studio mirror instead of turning to face her. “Look, come here,” she invites, stretching her arm behind her. 

Haruka picks herself up from the corner she had fit herself into and walks toward Seira. Takes Seira’s hand when they’re close enough, laces their fingers together, firm and familiar. Seira shuffles her feet and tugs at Haruka until they’re toeing the same line on the tile pattern beneath them. 

“See?” Seira asks. The spotless mirror reflecting their differing heights reflecting back at them, stark and unkind. _Look_ , it says, _you and Haruka are so far apart._ “Look at you—perfect to centre. How am I supposed to pull this off?”

The veil Seira tries to drape is useless. Haruka steps around so she’s in front of Seira, swallowing her entire field of vision. Haruka’s hand leaves Seira’s so she can put both of hers on either of Seira’s shoulders. “Brilliantly,” Haruka answers. “Because you deserve it, no matter how much you think you don’t.”

Here: Haruka’s vexing ability to see through all of Seira’s carefully built layers, as if they were all transparent and razor-thin. An intensity that both roots Seira and makes her want to forge an escape, all wrangling contradiction. 

But then—Haruka offering a smile, edge of her gaze sanded down to tenderness. A small lean of her head forward. A pull Seira’s never able to resist. She meets Haruka for a kiss, drinks in her low hum. Reaches out to thumb her hipbone through her training shorts, feels the quiet bloom of joy even after all this time. 

“You’ll be fine,” Haruka tells her, once they separate. She places another kiss on the corner of Seira’s mouth, on her forehead. Seira reaches out and fists Haruka’s training vest. 

Haruka’s own hand is gentle, travelling from the crown of Seira’s head back to her shoulder. “You’ll be fine,” she says again, and Seira is in love with her enough to believe her. 

  
  
  
  
  


“Don’t you get dizzy?”

“Maybe a little,” Haruka replies, shrugging. Fingers careful when she flips to the next page of her manga. “Do this all the time.”

They’re only halfway into the trip but Seira already hears it: Haruka’s accent creeping to the surface as they speed away from Tokyo, colouring her sentences. The melodious _-yade_ tacked at the end somehow anchoring Seira even when they’re hurtling at three hundred and fifty kilometers an hour. Recalls every time Haruka had done this: scattered - _hen_ s and - _yan_ s in her speech that always remind Seira of sunlight, of her mother’s bentos, of the buzz of cicadas in the trees. 

A voiced thought escapes from Seira’s mouth: “It’s a wonder you still have it.”

Haruka looks up, wrinkle between her brows. “Which?”

“Accent,” she indulges. “Always thought yours should have been gone by now.”

Haruka chews on her lip. “Was too old when we moved,” she tells her. “Speak it with my parents, too.”

This much Seira knew. Would catch whispers of Haruka when she’s on the phone with them, rare slices of day where the rigidity of Haruka’s shoulders melt into sweetness. “You think you’ll ever lose it?”

“Of course not.” Haruka closes the volume and fits it between her thigh and the armrest of her seat. She looks back, tells Seira, “You help me keep it.”

The smile on Haruka’s face strikingly handsome, her voice slow and certain as August midafternoons. Seira remembers: trying to stomp her voice into city street flatness, only for it to roar back up when Haruka opens her mouth. Remembers: Haruka saying, _Don’t worry, I never knew we were the only ones who said that until I left, too_ , fingertips soft at the back of her hand. Remembers: the small pang of heartache she feels every time her tongue wraps around cresting waves when she speaks to Haruka—for the home she left, the home that’s now only half of two. 

“Yours is just so strong,” Haruka adds, words now drenched in Western cadence. “Think anyone would speak it, if they were with you.”

Seira scoffs and breaks out into a grin. Haruka returns it. Seira reaches out, all the spilling affection she can muster, because Haruka carries that, too—piece of Seira’s faraway home tucked underneath her palate. The hill they were born on and the hill they climb. She cradles the side of Haruka’s face. Her warmth on Seira’s bare palm like a hearth. 

  
  
  
  


“ _Can’t see you._ ”

Seira reaches for her bedside lamp and switches it on. “Better?”

On her phone screen, Haruka beams. “ _Yeah._ ”

The commotion behind Haruka is shrouded by the pitch-black of midnight—but Seira’s absence from it makes it burst in colour, as if someone had taken a slider and cranked up its vibrance. Palpable. Tangible. Megaphone-amplified voices, clangs of metal rods, wooden boxes stacked on top of each other, overflowing. 

“Tired yet?” Seira asks. 

“ _Very_.” Haruka sighs and rubs at her eyes. “ _You know me and MV shoots, I’m just not—_ ”

Seira likes to think she hides it well. But there must have been a giveaway, even in the sparse light—a twitch of her lip, a clench of her jaw, maybe, something that Haruka catches—because Haruka bites her tongue, cuts herself off. 

Haruka purses her lips, lets out an exhale. It condenses into a white puff of fog in front of her before dissipating. “ _You should be here, you know._ ”

An ache behind her brows. Pain still not healed. “Haruka,” Seira chides. 

The glass screen of Seira’s phone does nothing to dampen the insistence of Haruka’s gaze, present and stifling again. “ _Seira_ ,” she returns. 

“They gave me centre.” Her practiced defence. Favour still bestowed on her even when it’s not the favour she wishes. Her and Haruka both aware of its flimsiness; Haruka’s own position history proof enough. 

Still, Haruka unrelenting: “ _Next single. You’re here_.”

Words Seira’s been keeping from telling herself, still stinging from the recent shortcoming. Was sure she would make it, before then—but look now. Promise in Haruka’s voice like daybreak. Hope dangled in front of Seira, ambition pulled open before her. Her greatest dream: she and Haruka the fourth iteration, plastered across headlines. The group always led by pair, anyway. Them at the forefront, the face, the mouthpiece. Their names inseparable from each other’s. From the group’s. A future history that feels both faraway and too close at once. 

Seira picks at the frayed edge of her pillowcase, hides from the stripped-down honesty of the roundness of Haruka’s eyes. Blinks away the image conjured in her head, unwilling to let its possibility consume her. Runs away from it. “You just miss me too much,” she tells Haruka. 

Haruka drops all her pretense, knowing, and Seira finally sees it: tendrils of exhaustion drawing themselves on her lovely face, evidence left by nearly twenty straight hours of a camera lens watching her. Softened by winter and the faint light of her screen reflecting back. Smile that made Seira fall in love. “ _There’s that, too._ ”

  
  
  
  


“All done?”

Sunset settles golden around the two of them, slanted shadows stretching across the floor of Seira’s bedroom. Steady sound of pencil scratching against paper; Haruka’s attentive repetition. Looks up at Seira then back, holds her work in front of her. “Think so,” she replies. 

Seira crawls over to peer at it. Her own profile centre-page, but the differences stand out: how Haruka had raised the slope of her nose, the edge of her eyelid. Feathered the corner of her mouth. Added to the length of her lashes. 

Seira’s lips pull forward in a pout. “Don’t you think you prettied me up too much?”

Haruka hums. “Not really.” Cranes her neck back to face her. “You _are_ pretty.” Then, mouth crooked in a smile: “And I know how to draw my favourite face on earth.”

There’s Haruka’s weapon: heartbreaker-grade charm. Seira scrunches her nose and pulls back; Haruka only laughs, moves toward Seira, anyway. Places a kiss on her cheek, noses the hinge of her jaw. Settles there, on Seira’s shoulder. 

“Bet you say that to all the girls you draw,” Seira teases, scratches at the soft skin of Haruka’s elbow. Her sketchpad lies in her lap, forgotten, her pencil lost somewhere in Seira’s sheets. 

“‘Course not,” Haruka’s reply comes swift; indignant. “Just you, Seira.”

Cupid’s arrow to Seira’s Achilles struck clean. Remembers when Haruka first called her with it, name stripped of any affixes, shy bravery falling from her lips. Telling intimacy and marked affection. Remembers the rollercoaster-drop swoop of her stomach in response: her ears ringing in its newness, but also the promise that it’ll be worn over time, Haruka’s mouth fitting around it like inevitability. The way it does now. 

Seira adjusts herself to kiss her, fingers still circling at the sharp jut of Haruka’s elbow. Haruka responds with such a pleased sigh that Seira wonders if this is what she’d been chasing all this time, pretty flattery wielded as honeybait. Haruka kisses like she draws: with slow deliberateness, with careful detail. Has Seira memorised: how Seira likes a hand at the back of her neck, how Seira likes a small tug on her lower lip. 

When they separate, Seira’s eyes readjust. Evening had cast itself on them, sky outside the endless violet of their crest. Haruka’s cheeks tinged pink. 

“Just me?” Seira asks. Tucks stray strands of hair behind Haruka’s ear. Wants to hear the still-unbelievable answer—Kaki Haruka, brandished dreaminess pulled straight from a romance novel; could have any girl she wants, probably. But—

“Only you,” Haruka answers. “Only ever you.”

  
  
  
  
  


“So tired.”

Haruka says it through a yawn. She’s leaned her head on the car window, shoulders slumped over. The first week of single release is cruel to them all—but to some more than most. 

“Almost home,” Seira says, patting Haruka’s head. 

“Had fun, though,” Haruka replies. “Having schedules with you is always nice. Wish we could do it more.”

“Let’s bring it up with staff. Or Manatsu-san.” Seira switches to stroking Haruka’s hair, already hears her breathing slowing down. “Maybe we could do a Showroom or two.”

“An hour alone with you? Broadcasted live?” Haruka’s laugh comes slow, snowmelt on the pavement. “I’d cause so much trouble. We’ll have to graduate the next day.”

Seira follows in Haruka’s laughter. Continues the rhythm she’s set, trying to lull Haruka, chasing the sinking of her back into sleep, the slow heaviness of her head. But then Haruka takes Seira’s hand in hers, scratches the space between Seira’s palm and the knuckle of her thumb: this is Haruka seeking. 

“What’s wrong?” 

Haruka sighs with her entire day’s heaviness. “Do you ever wonder, like—” Presses her nail into Seira’s skin. Intakes a sharp breath. “What if?”

 _What if._ It’s enough for Seira to know what she means. Through the rearview mirror Seira sees the troubled pinch between Haruka’s brows. 

The could-have-beens line up, filtered vignettes of possibilities, film unreeling: Meeting Haruka in mornings in Osaka instead of Tokyo. Stealing sunlit kisses in a school hallway instead of a TV broadcast station. Haruka walking her home in a school uniform, dipped in dusk gold. Haruka outside Kaiyukan in the rain. Haruka drinking milk tea, smile blooming on her face like wisteria. Haruka’s hand in hers on a subway platform, hair getting swept by the force of an arriving train. All of them bursting sweetness on Seira’s tongue like midautumn persimmons—but fading just as quickly, only remembrance left in her mouth. 

“Sometimes,” Seira admits. “But my life isn’t made of what-ifs.”

There is so much lost in the in-betweens, Seira thinks. Haruka’s mischievous grin when they're together, thrill of a secret kept rushing under their skin. The tenderness of Haruka’s kisses in a choreography studio, stolen moments alone. And for Seira, too—her body lives for the moments when she’s seen, limbs slotting into perfect angles, applause like fuel. Lives for the burning heat of spotlights on her skin. Lives for the exigent climb. Lives for the moments the drumbeat times in the rhythm of her heart. 

“I have two of my dreams in the palm of my hand.” Seira shifts, extricates herself from Haruka so she’s looking at her square in the eye. “I have the stage, and I have someone I love more than I know how to.”

Haruka is still beautiful, here, in front of Seira. The full spectrum of Tokyo night reflecting on her handsome, wistful face, eyes gleaming in the passing light and shadow. The sureness of her hand in Seira’s, the steady weight. Haruka, in all her gorgeous earnestness, Seira’s for the taking. Seira wants it all. Seira is so devastatingly in love. 

“This is all I have, Kaki Haruka.” A confession—reached in from her chest, her beating heart for Haruka’s to see. She holds her hand tighter. “And if I’m being honest, it’s all I need.”

**Author's Note:**

> [twitter](http://twitter.com/mediumcoelis), [curiouscat](http://curiouscat.me/pisceshorizon)


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